Monitor home and just about everything with Zabbix and Grafana

Back in part 107 of this blog I went bananas and made a local LLava AI model to recognize what is in the image. But how reliably Llava('s smallest model) does actually recognize what is in the picture? Let's test it with Zabbix!

Methodology

For this test, I am 

I might sound like a monZphere fanboy, but that's because I am a monZphere fanboy. Another super cool module of their is their freshly published Zabbix Problem Analysis module, which is open-source and freely available for us all on Github.

The module adds a new Details button after an each alert on Problems view, giving you an easy way to get insights about that particular alert.

As I will be a speaker at the Zabbix Summit 2025, I've been busy building stuff for it; also had a summer holiday in July. Sorry for the long silence! Anyway, let's move on to today's topic.

MonZphere is cooking something really cool. 

Another year, yet another speech from me at the Zabbix Summit 2025! :) Be there! This time I'll be doing a short Lightning Talk about how I monitor my nearby surroundings and events with Zabbix.

When leaving your home, the traditional background chatterbox in your head can be thinking things like "Did I lock the front door?", "Did I turn off the oven?" and so forth. 

With an IoT hub like Cozify, there's another one. For example, if my parents -- who are not very technological -- will come to our house to entertain and look after the puppy whilst we are somewhere away with my wife and our toddler, without Zabbix my head would think "Did I remember to switch Cozify to such mode that it won't change the Home scene status to Away scene?". 

I stumbled upon something called Nanobrowser. It's a Chrome extension which turns your browser into open source AI web agent. 

What's an AI web agent? It makes your web browsing more exciting, with all the gotchas of LLMs combined with the speed and reliability that resembles a drunk grandpa attempting to use a computer without his glasses. No, jokes aside, it is kind of impressive. You just tell it what you want and it attempts to use your browser instead of you. Check this out:

I admit, this entry is very far-fetched (or near-fetched, depending on your camera position), but I'm sure you can come up with actual use cases for this. One scenario I can think of is that if you have a CCTV in your factory or whatever and something should stay within X meters from the camera, you can do it with this trick.

Zabbix 7.4.0rc1 came out and of course I upgraded my What's up, home? Zabbix version to it. Even though the changes in Zabbix 7.4 seem to be relatively minor, there's some very welcome changes and new features. Underneath, there's good stuff for bigger environments: ability to give bigger history cache, trend cache; database query optimizations; your usual set of bugfixes and performance improvements ...  but there's more than that.

Lately my home router ASUS AX-68U with Asuswrt-Merlin firmware has been using much more CPU than it used to do. It's not being slow or anything, but I'm curious how its CPU usage jumped since I last updated the firmware. This kind of jump in CPU usage cannot be a coincidence and definitely something that I want to track down. Below is a graph from my home Zabbix dashboard.

First, apologies for not posting in a while, I have been terribly busy at work and at home as we have the puppy.

When playing around with different LLMs with Ollama, you might want to see how fast some model is. Ollama won't return you any performance statistics in server mode (or does it? Let me know!), so to get the statistics to Zabbix I had to be creative. For those who don't know, Ollama is a cross-platform software for running all kinds of LLMs locally.